Interactive Training in Emergency Operations for the Response Community

In this competitive revision Phase II SBIR, Gryphon Scientific proposes to expand the scope of the ongoing project to support the urgent need to develop and deploy training for two populations of citizen responders at risk of coronavirus exposure. The ongoing Phase II SBIR project focuses on training responders, including Community Emergency Response Teams (CERT) and the Medical Reserve Corps (MRC). We will expand the training for this group and add training for essential workers, a category of citizen responder that includes a large variety of occupations from transit employees to grocery workers. The training content in our existing grant includes such topics as disaster operations, deployment safety, mass casualty triage, and light search and rescue. Here, Gryphon proposes to incorporate a self-paced biopreparedness foundations minicourse and an adaptive role-playing minigame focused on pathogen safety for citizen responders. Building on the role-playing system, Gryphon also proposes to build interactive scenarios to train essential workers on core pathogen safety concepts. The full package will be deployed freely through app marketplaces for self-service remote training. This training technology would reinforce the ongoing efforts by training organizations across the US to improve safety for at-risk workers performing essential job functions. Recognizing that financial constraints pose a barrier to the sale of novel commercial training products, the app will be deployed at no out-of-pocket cost to organizations or trainees using an advertising-supported business model commonly encountered in the mobile video-game market.Even before the pandemic, educators and researchers called for enhanced pathogen literacy in the general public as an essential component of pandemic preparedness. This study proposes to collect valuable data on learners’ understanding of pathogen safety fundamentals and the potential efficacy of remote educational approaches to enhance microbiological literacy. Usability and knowledge retention in citizen responders will be integrated into the base Phase II study. An additional study with essential workers will test their usability and knowledge gains from using remote self-service learning products. Testers will be randomly assigned into three groups of 20 people who (1) use the app regularly for 3 months, (2) use the app once, at the start of the three-month period, and (3) a control group who do not receive the app. All testers will complete three short assessments: pre-training baseline, immediately post-training (or one week after the pre-assessment for the control group), and approximately three months following the date of first training. The initial products developed in this study may directly improve microbiological literacy among at-risk populations, and these early studies may help to inform future training interventions.Project Narrative In our active grant, we are developing an interactive mobile training platform that can be used by disaster response volunteers and researchers to regularly refresh their skills on such topics as disaster operations, deployment safety, mass casualty triage, and light search and rescue. In this supplemental application, we are developing two additions: (1) expanding the current training platform to provide pathogen safety information and practice scenarios related to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), and (2) expanding and testing the pathogen safety module to provide essential workers with role-playing scenarios to reinforce their prior training by practicing key pathogen safety concepts. The public interest in a well-informed citizenry and safe workforce will be well served by these expansions that will supplement and reinforce existing in-person training efforts.